SyntaxSorcerer

SyntaxSorcerer

What are your favorite must-haves for "vibe engineering" with Elixir?

I found Elixir after a friend recommended looking into it for developing a multi-agent orchestration and task management system. Soon afterwards, I saw Chris McCord’s keynote at ElixirConf US 2025 about what makes Elixir such a great fit for building these types of tools, as well as why it’s a good candidate for increasing developer velocity by taking advantage of AI tools. It’s a really inspiring talk!

I’m very new to the Elixir ecosystem so most of my energy is focused on learning the fundamentals, but here are some things I’m playing around with as I build up my skillset:

  • Elixir Expert LSP
    • I just integrated this into emacs over the weekend and use it with lsp-mode and helm-lsp and elixir-ts-mode and some other core packages … (My Nix configs are kind of a mess and as soon as they’re in good shape I’ll share my emacs config for anyone who’s interested.)
  • Tidewave for Phoenix (MCP)
    • I’m not doing a lot with Phoenix because I’m more focused on Elixir fundamentals, but after tinkering on a small project on a lazy Saturday this looks very promising.
  • I set up GitHub Actions to run Dialyzer and some security scans
  • Claude Code has been my favorite CLI tool, but I’m also experimenting with Codex and Gemini CLI
    • Excited to see how good Gemini 3.0 is when it presumably drops next month in December

For those of you who are experimenting with “vibe engineering” (important distinction between this and “vibe coding” imo), what tools have been invaluable to you?

Most Liked

garrison

garrison

I will point out that my thread in that list was specifically not about using agents to write code, which I considered then (and still consider now) to be rather absurd. I expected agents to catch on with low-risk activities like search rather than stuff like programming where correctness is actually important.

To my surprise, writing code (poorly) seems to have caught on as the “killer app” for agents, and that’s about where I lost interest and went back to writing databases.

I should say that, while I’m quite sure LLMs are helpful for asking questions, I strongly doubt asking models to write code for you is a good path to learning a language. Similarly, I don’t think you can learn math by asking the model to do problems for you. The part where you have to think about your decisions is the learning part. So just be careful.

Onor.io

Onor.io

Not to be a gatekeeper but “vibe engineering” strikes me as an oxymoron. Vibe is associated with loose and intuitional. Engineering is precise and provable. I can’t tell anyone else what to do or think but I do find the term “vibe engineering” a bit troubling.

AstonJ

AstonJ

Some of these threads might also be of interest SS…

Where Next?

Popular in AI / LLMs Top

DaAnalyst
Seriously, what do you do while Claude (or whatever you use) is doing its thing?
New
sergio
Code agents work best in Elixir because it’s a functional language with minimal implicit configurations and conventions. The code you se...
#ai
New
DaAnalyst
Note: Not a strictly Elixir question but relates to us as well. A year or so ago I asked Grok (or ChatGPT, can’t remember) what would ha...
New
woohaaha
Sorry if I’m overthinking this. To date, Elixir is my favorite language. I don’t think of reaching for another language if I don’t have ...
New
AndyL
For development and prototyping, I’d like to retain a basic ability to perform LLM inference on my own hardware, using open source models...
#ai
New
New
nathanl
This isn’t an Elixir library, but if you’re testing with phoenix_test_playwright | Hex , you might like a new tool I recently made. When...
New
borag
I shared an Elixir Architect skill for Claude Code which proves that Elixir is the best LLM friendly language (@josevalim ) https://git...
New
Cheezy
I spent the month of January building and refining a tool to help with Team / AI collaboration. Several friends have provided feedback an...
New
SyntaxSorcerer
I found Elixir after a friend recommended looking into it for developing a multi-agent orchestration and task management system. Soon aft...
New

Other popular topics Top

hariharasudhan94
lets say i have a sample like a = 20; b = 10; if (a > b) do {:ok, "a"} end if (a < b) do {:ok, b} end if (a == b) do {:ok, "equa...
New
chrismccord
As promised, the first release candidate of Phoenix 1.3.0 is out! This release focuses on code generators with improved project structure...
New
lessless
I believe there are people here who are dealing with CSV files import on the daily basis, and since Excel is a really popular tool there ...
New
greenz1
I have a phoenix application from which a user can download multiple(5-6) files of size 1MB. I couldn’t find anything related to sending ...
New
belgoros
I’m not a pro in using Regex and can’t figure out why the following behaviour happens, especially if we take into account the difference ...
New
stefanchrobot
What’s the safe way to decode a JSON string into a struct? I want to avoid calling String.to_atom. Jason.decode can give me a map with st...
New
jay1
Why is it that the mnesia database isn’t the most preferred database for use in Elixir/Phoenix?
New
jason.o
In the code below, if the create action is not set to accept “extra_key” as an input, it errors out with a message shown above. Is there ...
New
shijith.k
I am trying to start a new phoenix project with elixir 1.9, but mix phx.new does not work. It says that ** (Mix) The task "phx.new" could...
New
jononomo
For some reason my phoenix channels are working for me in my local dev environment, but as soon as I deploy via Docker, I get a 403 error...
New

Latest on Elixir Forum

Elixir Forum

We're in Beta

About us Mission Statement